Lisa Kallai - January 28, 2008

Thoughts on Sharing Stories of Holocaust

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It's such an unusual story...

Yeah.

...it, it, it might, it might lead to some cohesiveness among the, among the children, at least I would have, I would have thought. Um, do you think it's important for people to tell their stories the way you have and the way some of the others have?

Well, first of all I think Winton's story should be told. I think he deserves his story to be told. I think in general, it is important, people should know, yes.

The Spielberg organization has done...

Yes.

...fifty three thousand interviews. Um, I worked with them for a year and their one rule was that they all had to end with a Hollywood ending...every story had to end going up, the way the movie does. And uh, some people have a hard time with having it so...

???

...carefully planned but there's 53,000 interviews out there now...

Mm-hm.

...and there are at least that many more in some 80 different oral history projects around the, around the world...

But how can you make them all end happy?

You can't, you can't and uh, which is why I only worked with them for a year. I couldn't. Uh, you can't, I mean people stop...they, they just spent two hours talking about the, they death of thirty members of their family and they want them to say something upbeat at the end. It's just uh, not always possible.

Mm-hm.

Do you know at all...have you any ideas about what happened to those members of your family who did not survive? You said grandparents you thought went to Treblinka? Is that right?

Yes. Um, no I don't. I mean, I know they were killed...I presumed they were killed immediately because they were too old to work...